Correlating Knowledge Management to cost savings

[servicenowkevin]

About two weeks ago Julia Lloyd created a post called What do you find to be the most challenging part of Knowledge Management. In the comments of that, Jeff Smith and I started talking about getting resources and proving value and I decided I should touch on the topic in a blog here because it's such a major issue that we all face.

I'll talk about how I currently (and aim to) prove value with ServiceNow and will touch on what I've seen done with other organizations.

There are three main things you need to do to continue proving the value (cost savings) of KM:

1. Define measures
2. Communicate
3. Evolve

Defining Measures

There's a few fairly common things that people focus on when defining success metrics for KM:

• Link rate between articles and incidents
• Deflection, including people not filing a case when they've shown intent and positive ratings on content
• Views

Having measures is important, but after setting a baseline, you also need to set goals and have reasons for those goals.

A small bit of clean data is more useful than a large set of garbage data. Don't force people to link or contribute. When you do, you'll get garbage data.

If you're creating goals for teams outside of your own, like Support, make sure to work closely with them, including managers and front-line staff. Having representatives from each group as part of the goal definitions means easier buy-in and helps you understand their processes better.

Communicate

When you have defined measures, you need to socialize the measures have everybody buying in. This is usually pretty easy, what's hard is making sure people keep the measures in mind and respect what you're reporting.

Communicating about whether you're hitting targets on a monthly or quarterly basis is a good practice, but there needs to be more than to drive home the point and make the work more tangible. You need to brag about your success. We published a series of content in early March that included a mix of videos, KB content, and traditional documentation. In April, the time to relief in that area lowered by 40% and the incident volume decreased by about 12-15%. When we overlay our views on top of that data and include our "go-live" point, we can show a very strong correlation between TTRelief/deflection and our content. When you have these strong examples, you need to share them widely and share up and down in the organization.

Right now, I do three sets of communications to the senior leadership in Development and Support. A monthly look at volume and TTRelief per incident category, a weekly look at the work happening in the incident categories and the use of content, and finally ad hoc communications to specific leadership people about content success stories in their area.

Evolve

Our world changes pretty routinely. What was a good metric and measure today may not be one tomorrow. You can't be stuck on the same goals and measures. If there's a new merger, a new product, or everybody is always hitting goals, then you need to assess what you have set as your goals. As there are more data points available to you, look for ways to provide a more accurate representation of deflection or impact.

Above, where I discuss the overlay of view data with TTR and incident rates per category, is an evolution of what we're currently doing. All of the information exists now, but it isn't being presented together as a cohesive unit.

Work with your team regularly and talk about what you're measuring and challenge each other. That's how the conversations get started and you start to get a richer view of the impact KM has.

So how do you prove cost savings?